|> -----Original Message-----
|> From: Brian King [mailto:BKing at Impact-Technologies.com]
|> Sent: Wednesday, January 30, 2002 1:35 PM
|> To: thelist at lists.evolt.org|> Subject: [thelist] Powerpoint on the web?
|>|>|> I am soliciting ideas for incorporating Powerpoint
|> presentations on the web.
Hi Brian. I have sort of specialized circumstances, but I don't think
it's unusable under more varied circs. Here's how we do it.
We know our visitors; these presentations go on secure sites for the
most part. They're being accessed on fast machines with big monitors
(highish resolutions) over fat pipes, and our visitors have JavaScript
ON.
First, I take screen shots of the presentation. I use my laptop at
1024x768 to give me room to pare them down. I use CaptureEze, but you
can't get the GIF89a format filter any more, and it seems to be the best
format (I have an older copy, so I can save as GIF.) As I'm doing the
shots, I watch for simple screen builds (paragraphs of text pop in, a
graphic adds layers, etc.) which will work well as static pages, but for
the most part, the pages get snapped in their final static format.
Fortunately, our Director of MarComm hates too much motion, so this
stuff is minimal.
I have droplets in PhotoShop to resize the pics; once at 686 px wide and
once at 77 px wide. These are the main images and thumbnails. For my
layout, these fit nicely on a 1024x768 screen.
I have a framed layout (yes, frames are evil; I keep conquering the evil
with good, or something like that) which has thumbs down the left, a
borderless frame with a 'back' arrow, content frame, and a borderless
frame with a 'forth' arrow. If there's accompanying text, it goes in yet
another frame below content. So, with text and images, it looks a bit
like this:
----------------------------------
| t | < > |
| h | |
| u | |
| m | content |
| b | |
| n | |
| a | |
| i |____________________________|
| l | |
| s | text |
| | |
----------------------------------
When you click a thumbnail, it loads the pic in 'content' and the text
in 'text.' If you click the 'back' or 'forth' button, it does the
obvious until it hits the end and gives an alert "That's the first/last
slide" or whatever, depending on how cocky I'm feeling.
I've tuned the process so I can get a presentation live in about one
minute per slide. When I'm handed a 60 page presentation and can make it
live in 60 minutes, it makes my team look pretty slick. (This is with
only one person on the task; the screen caps are over 50% of the work.)
If you're interested in the code I'd be glad to forward it offlist.
There's a working example at http://www.magisnetworks.com/media if you'd
like to give it a peep. I don't claim any responsibility for the
artistic abilities of the VP who created the PowerPoint show.
joel